— Russell BrandContext: How did it feel in there to you when you were a child, in the aquarium of your head? I was lonely in mine as the world swam by in immaculately choreographed schools, like an inaccessible gang of Nemos. I was only really at ease with my mum and animals, and I treated them pretty badly. If you feel how I felt, I have been taught a few techniques that might help you. Here’s one for a kick-off: You have to forgive everyone for everything. You can’t cling on to any blame that you may be using to make sense of the story of your life. Even me with my story of one nan that I love and another that I don’t—that story is being used to maintain a certain perspective of mine, a perspective that justifies the way I am, and by justifying the way I am I ensure that I stay the same. I’m no longer interested in staying the same; I’m interested in Revolution, that means I have to go back and change the story of my childhood.

— Russell BrandContext: Have you ever tried to argue with someone who doesn’t want anything from you? It’s hard. Have you ever noticed in a row with someone that no longer loves you that you have no recourse?' No tools with which to bargain.

— Russell BrandContext: On the short walk to the front past the others, either bowing or kneeling or whirling or howling, I feel glad that my life is this way; so full of jarring experience. Sometimes you feel that life is full and beautiful, all these worlds, all these people, all these experiences, all this wonder. You never know when you will encounter magic. Some solitary moment in a park can suddenly burst open with a spray of preschool children in high-vis vests, hand in hand; maybe the teacher will ask you for directions, and the children will look at you, curious and open, and you’ll see that they are perfect. In the half-morning half-gray glint, the cobwebs on bushes are gleaming with such radiant insistence, you can feel the playful unknown beckoning. Behind impassive stares in booths, behind the indifferent gum chew, behind the car horns, there is connection.

— Russell BrandContext: It felt like the end of the world. I get prophetic flashes. There, I’ve said it. There are times when I see reality unfurl—not like the future is revealed, more like the past, or the present, like I can see the projector from which the spectacle is emitted. In the moment I feel dread. I watched them—maybe it’s my own cultural indoctrination, I’ve watched a lot of films and gone on a lot of conspiratorial websites, so my mind too has been narrativized; I’m not free from tales and agendas. I saw the earth crack open and yawn belligerent fire and the sea take back her bounty. The animals in nightmarish calm know the end is nigh and move to high lands. The unduly unfurled flags are lashed by rain and untethered from their masts by lightning. All nature converges; the purple sky bears down on the cleaved soil as Earth roars. The furious ocean envelops her lover, as long-somnolent beasts rise up from the deep. Things don’t fall apart; they move suddenly inward, in vengeful implosion.

— Russell BrandContext: Diablo and I fashioned my beard together in my trailer, together, as cautiously as you’d sculpt a peace treaty between two nations that prefer war to peace. The reality was that my identity outside of filmmaking had become more important to me. I was doing hours of yoga and meditation each day, I was going through a divorce, and the result was a kind of hirsute intransigence. I looked like the cliché of a terrorist and I behaved like one. Except the beard wasn’t the symbol, it was the cause. I feel some guilt about my lack of enthusiasm for acting, like it’s a bit ungrateful. Like I’ve let my teenage self down. Mind you, he let himself down a fair bit, the dirty little pervert. The dreams of my adolescent self were entangled with silvery screens and limousines, and I still feel that I need to offer up superficial sacrifices to his misguided altar. The fact is, though, I find filmmaking a boring process and its ends dubious. This could, of course, be due to the quality of the stuff I’ve done so far, as opposed to an essential rejection of an art form. Maybe if I’d been “R. P. McMurphy” or “The Elephant Man” or “Brian,” I’d feel different. It just wasn’t what I thought it would be. It’s not just the entertainment industry that has seemed like a mirage on arrival. What about clubs and parties? When I’m there I think, “Is this it? Is this all there is? Is this what all the fuss is about?” This feeling of disillusionment perhaps climaxed around the time of my divorce and the making of this subsequent film.

— Russell BrandContext: For me, it’s standard. I don’t feel irresponsible for telling kids not to vote; I feel like I deserve a Blue Peter badge for not telling them to riot. For not telling them that they are entitled to destroy the cathedrals of tyranny erected to mock them in the heart of their community. That they should rise up and destroy the system that imprisons them, ignores them, condemns and maligns them. By any means necessary.' I might also note that I think it unlikely that people aren’t voting because I told them not to; it is more likely that they’re not voting because they are subject to the same conditions that led me not to vote.

— Russell BrandContext: "I don’t see myself as a yoga person or a man who meditates and prays and eats well and says “Namaste” or “God bless you.” I became that because I exhausted all other options. There was a point, I’ll admit, when I flung myself full force into an L. A. New Age lifestyle. I’d just got divorced, and a movie I wanted to do well didn’t meet my expectations. My response to this was to stop shaving and start wearing pajamas outdoors. That is relatively typical behavior for any lunatic; we see them everywhere—twitching, twisting, hollering at their imagined foes. The difference is I was doing it in Hollywood and my pajamas looked suitably ethnic, so I think I got away with it. Although my mates have subsequently told me they were worried and, thinking about it, they did drop hints like “Trim your beard, you look like a shoe bomber” and “Stop wearing them gap-year trousers, you fuckin’ nut,” but I was immune. A friend of mine, himself no stranger to mental illness, and that’s putting it lightly—he’s a right fucking fruitcake, living at his mum’s on disability benefits—said to me, “In India if you have a mental breakdown, they don’t build you back up again; they leave you in communion with God.” He then looked up, mimicking, I supposed, an Indian yogi, and raised his hands and eyes skywards as if he were playing a tiny accordion just in front of his hairline. “They say, ‘Ah, he’s in conversation with Brahman now,’ and they revere you. In this country they just give you a bus pass.”

— Russell BrandContext: This may be one of the many points in this book where you are shouting the word “hypocrite” as you read. Don’t think I’m unaware of the inevitability of such a charge. I know. I know. I’m rich, I’m famous, I have money, I’m being paid money for this book, I have had private security on and off for years. There is no doubt that I as much as anyone have to change. The only thing I can offer you in the face of this legitimate accusation is that change is something I’m good at. I know that change is a necessity. I have had to change to survive. I’d also like to add, by way of mitigation, that I could’ve just written Booky Wook 3, not mentioned global inequality, ecological meltdown, or the complicity of the entertainment industry in holding together a capitalist machine that exploits the vast majority of people, and collected my check. When I was poor and complained about inequality they said I was bitter; now that I’m rich and I complain about inequality they say I’m a hypocrite. I’m beginning to think they just don’t want to talk about inequality. Revolution is change. I believe in change, personal change most of all; at this time, however, we must coordinate a massive change, so, please, shout “hypocrite” at an inanimate object if you must, but please don’t dismiss the ideas in this book. Know, too, that I am prepared for change, that I have seen what fame and fortune have to offer and I know it’s not the answer. That doesn’t diminish these arguments, it enhances them. Of course I have to change as an individual, and part of that will be sharing wealth, though without systemic change will be a sweet, futile gesture.

— Russell BrandContext: The first thing is serenity. The agitation has to end. The itchy irritability, the restlessness, the wanting. So do the lows, the self-loathing, wretched, heavy-hearted, lead-gutted, teary-eyed, dry-mouthed misery. The pain. So do the highs. The wide-eyed, bilious highs, the cheek-chewing, trouble-brewing highs, the never-stopping-till-I-touch-the-sky highs, the up-at-dawn hitting-the-pipe highs, chasing, defacing, heart-racing highs, gagging, shagging, blagging highs. All the things we do to change the way we feel, the way the world looks and tastes: It’s all got to go. So courage is necessary. Courage to change yourself, the one thing you can change. Your attitude and actions. Neither the serenity nor the courage are available to you on your own; if they were, you would’ve found them by now—you’ve been pretty fastidious in your research. God, however you conceptualize him, will have to grant them to you. And whatever you conceptualize God as, with your human mind, your individual brain, made up of instinctive responses, training, and memories, however you conceptualize a power that’s beyond you and the decisions you’ve made so far, your conception will be extremely limited. Likely as limited as my cat’s conception of the Internet. The invisible network of interconnected portals that communicate data are beyond my cat’s comprehension. My cat’s inability to comprehend does not impede the Internet. The World Wide Web (which is incidentally quicker to say than “double-you, double-you, double-you-dot”) will continue to exist, regardless of my cat’s awareness. Pray, then, for wisdom, wisdom to know the difference between things we can change and things we can’t. Likely this will be a lifetime’s work, undertaken one day at a time. Which, for humans, is the way time happens. I don’t have to live the 25th of May 2022 yet. I might never have to. I only have to live in this moment. That’s why meditation comes in handy, and practicing it as a community has benefits too. How are we to achieve real change, conditions in which practices that lead to a different type of consciousness can plausibly be pursued?

— Russell BrandContext: The first thing is serenity. The agitation has to end. The itchy irritability, the restlessness, the wanting. So do the lows, the self-loathing, wretched, heavy-hearted, lead-gutted, teary-eyed, dry-mouthed misery. The pain. So do the highs. The wide-eyed, bilious highs, the cheek-chewing, trouble-brewing highs, the never-stopping-till-I-touch-the-sky highs, the up-at-dawn hitting-the-pipe highs, chasing, defacing, heart-racing highs, gagging, shagging, blagging highs. All the things we do to change the way we feel, the way the world looks and tastes: It’s all got to go. So courage is necessary. Courage to change yourself, the one thing you can change. Your attitude and actions. Neither the serenity nor the courage are available to you on your own; if they were, you would’ve found them by now—you’ve been pretty fastidious in your research. God, however you conceptualize him, will have to grant them to you. And whatever you conceptualize God as, with your human mind, your individual brain, made up of instinctive responses, training, and memories, however you conceptualize a power that’s beyond you and the decisions you’ve made so far, your conception will be extremely limited. Likely as limited as my cat’s conception of the Internet. The invisible network of interconnected portals that communicate data are beyond my cat’s comprehension. My cat’s inability to comprehend does not impede the Internet. The World Wide Web (which is incidentally quicker to say than “double-you, double-you, double-you-dot”) will continue to exist, regardless of my cat’s awareness. Pray, then, for wisdom, wisdom to know the difference between things we can change and things we can’t. Likely this will be a lifetime’s work, undertaken one day at a time. Which, for humans, is the way time happens. I don’t have to live the 25th of May 2022 yet. I might never have to. I only have to live in this moment. That’s why meditation comes in handy, and practicing it as a community has benefits too. How are we to achieve real change, conditions in which practices that lead to a different type of consciousness can plausibly be pursued?

— Russell BrandContext: It was a bizarre experience visiting him in there. Not least because I, as was the custom at the time, went to the powwow armed with a yoga teacher. I was hanging out with her a lot. I took her along to the MTV Movie Awards, which I was hosting, where at one point—perhaps the summit of my own personal Everest of Hollywood kookiness—she vetoed a joke from my opening monologue. It wasn’t unspiritual or mean; I think it was about Jennifer Aniston. It was cut “for time,” like the monologue was saggy. I don’t know if that makes it less weird. Tej, her name was, and she was a bloody good kundalini yoga teacher, and the lessons and techniques definitely induced interesting states of mind. Most people would’ve left it at that, but with my tendency for extremism, I first became teacher’s pet and then, in a macabre switcheroo, made the teacher into my pet. I’ve already told you I’m a sucker for a mystic costume. I’m like a wartime gal with a thing for uniforms, swooning at a G. I., and Tej’s get-up was world-class. Kundalini practitioners dress entirely in white—why not? They also wear a turban as the yogic practice they follow is derived from the Sikh faith. Tej was a lovely woman and we became good friends; I learned a lot and had a good laugh. A fair amount of that fun may have been derived, I realize in retrospect, from the novel thrill of turning up at unexpected places with a yogi. Like the MTV Movie Awards or the Ecuadorian embassy. During the production of my let’s call it experimental—with the emphasis on the “mental”—TV show Brand X (surely the last punning derivation my surname can provide), the whole of Tej’s yoga class, which consisted of about one hundred people, was uprooted and placed each morning at the studio where the show was recorded. That’s pretty mad, isn’t it? We left the comfort, tranquillity, sweet smells, and fine foods of the purpose-built yoga center to practice yoga in the functioning canteen of a TV production facility. Sometimes when you’re famous you can get away with being a lunatic. Especially if you’re like me and think the system is corrupt and rules have to be broken and conformity challenged. Before too long, you have a scenario where the teamsters who do all the heavy lifting on a TV show are confronted with the daily spectacle of a hundred yoga devotees descending on their canteen.

— Russell BrandContext: Who does a baby think he is before he can recognize his face in a mirror, before he’s taught his name, before he’s drummed into stagnant separation, cordoned off from the infinite oneness? Love is innate. We must be taught to hate, and now we must unlearn it, as the Buddhists say; let it burn, that which needs to burn, let it burn. The class system isn’t fair on them either, poor little sods—packed off to school, weaned on privatized maternity shopped in from a northern spinster. Trying to find love in the tangle of dismantled family. No one can be happy imbibing a poisoned brew. It’s poisonous for us all. They’ll gratefully sigh when we unlock them from their opulent penitentiaries, they’ll be grateful when their fallow lords and empty chambers feed the hungry and house the poor. They know contentment cannot be enjoyed when stolen. They need the Revolution as much as we do. The whole of human history is nothing new, the whole of your personal story is nothing true, you can do with it whatever you want to do—flick a switch, scratch the record off, look behind the veil. Anything you don’t want, discard; anything that hurts, let go. None of it’s real, you know—all that pain, all that regret, all that doubt, not thin enough, not a good enough mum, not a good enough son, not a good enough bum. You are enough; you’re enough; there’s nothing you can buy or try on that’s going to make you any better, because you couldn’t be any better than you are. Drag your past around if you like, an old dead decaying ox of what you think they might’ve thought or what might’ve been if you’d done what you ought. That which needs to burn, let it burn. If the idea doesn’t serve you, let it go. If it separates you from the moment, from others, from yourself, let it go.

— Russell BrandContext: There is always something for it to think, always something for it to solve, so whenever I first start to meditate, the mantra is a tiny clear droplet lost in a deluge of sludge. I’m not a person who finds meditation a doddle or to whom yoga comes naturally. To tell you the truth, I find the whole business a bit poncey and contrary to the way I used to see myself. It’s only the fact that I decimated my life by aggressively pursuing the models of living that were most immediately available—eating, wanking, drinking, consuming, getting famous—that I was forced to look at alternatives.

— Russell BrandContext: The women sway and jump and shriek. Whilst this is all almost entirely foreign, there is something familiar, like a place in your mouth where food always gets caught. Something I recognize. It is orgiastic. This Christianity with a voodoo twist is on the brink of Dionysian breakdown. Through this ritual, I see the root of ritual. The exorcising of the primal, the men engorged, enraged, the women serpentine and lithe. Only the child excluded. I get on my knees, which a few other people are doing, out of respect but also because I’m beginning to sense that it’s only a matter of time before I’m ushered to the front. I’ve not been taught how to be religious. Religious studies at school doesn’t even begin to cover it. There the world’s greatest faiths and the universe’s swirling mysteries are recited like bus timetables. No teacher of RE ever said to me: “Beyond the limited realm of the senses, the shallow pool of the known, is a great untamable ocean, and we don’t have a fucking clue what goes on in there.” What we receive through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch is all we know. We have tools that can enhance that information, we have theories for things that we suspect lie beyond that information, filtered through an apparatus limited once more to those senses. Those senses are limited; the light range we detect is within a narrow spectrum, between infrared light and ultraviolet light; other species see light that we can’t see. In the auditory realm, we hear but a fraction of the sound vibrations; we don’t hear high-pitched frequencies, like dog whistles, and we don’t hear low frequencies like whale song. The world is awash with colors unseen and abuzz with unheard frequencies. Undetected and disregarded. The wise have always known that these inaccessible realms, these dimensions that cannot be breached by our beautifully blunt senses, hold the very codes to our existence, the invisible, electromagnetic foundations upon which our gross reality clumsily rests. Expressible only through symbol and story, as it can never be known by the innocent mind. The stories are formulas, poems, tools for reflection through which we may access the realm behind the thinking mind, the consciousness beyond knowing and known, the awareness that is not connected to the haphazard data of biography. The awareness that is not prickled and tugged by capricious emotion. The awareness that is aware that it is aware. In meditation I access it; in yoga I feel it; on drugs it hit me like a hammer—at sixteen, staring into a bathroom mirror on LSD, contrary to instruction (“Don’t look in the mirror, Russ, it’ll fuck your head up.” Mental note: “Look in mirror.”). I saw that my face wasn’t my face at all but a face that I lived behind and was welded to by a billion nerves. I looked into my eyes and saw that there was something looking back at me that was not me, not what I’d taken to be me. The unrefined ocean beyond the shallow pool was cascading through the mirror back at me. Nature looking at nature. Not me, little ol’ Russ, tossed about on turbulent seas; these distinctions were engineered. On acid, these realizations are absolute. The disobedient brain is whipped into its basket like a yapping hound cowed by Cesar Millan.